Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Role

This is a founding-team engineering role at a construction technology AI startup, sitting at the intersection of engineering and customer success. You will own new AI automation use cases end-to-end, from discovery with enterprise stakeholders through production deployment, and have real influence over what gets built and how the company scales.

What You'll Do

• Own AI automation use cases end-to-end, from customer discovery through production deployment.
• Turn ambiguous enterprise customer problems into scoped, buildable solutions and ship them quickly.
• Build with modern applied AI including LLMs, agentic workflows, vision models, and embeddings.
• Design and implement data pipelines for document ingestion, extraction, validation, and orchestration.
• Identify recurring patterns across projects and codify them into reusable templates.
• Balance speed, accuracy, and pragmatism, keeping humans in the loop where appropriate.
• Travel to customer sites and work directly with German enterprise stakeholders.
• Help shape the technical direction of both product and company as an early hire.

What We're Looking For

• 2+ years of experience as a software engineer or data scientist building production systems.
• Hands-on experience deploying applied AI solutions (LLMs, agentic workflows, vision models, embeddings) in production.
• Strong CS fundamentals, from a degree or clearly equivalent formal grounding.
• Full-stack capability: backend API development in Node.js/TypeScript or Python, and frontend development in TypeScript/React or similar.
• Experience designing data pipelines for document processing, extraction, and validation workflows.
• Comfortable working with unstructured data (PDFs, images, documents), vector databases, and semantic search.
• Experience integrating multiple LLM providers (such as OpenAI, Azure, Gemini, or Cohere) and solid prompt engineering skills.
• B2B experience, ideally in a customer-facing technical role with direct enterprise engagement.
• Experience in an early-stage startup or founding team environment.
• C1-level German proficiency or above (required for enterprise customer interaction and on-site visits).
• Bonus: familiarity with domain ontologies, knowledge graphs, or construction industry workflows.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range

72,000 to 100,000 EUR annually. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.

Location

On-site, 5 days per week in Berlin, Germany, with occasional travel to customer sites across the region.